U.S. Massacre Brings Huge Wave of Protest
and Anger in Iraq and Arab World

[For the information of readers, we
reprint two reports from the mainstream press dated April 13, 2004.

[Again these reports illustrate the
urgency for the labor movement and all opponents of the Iraq war to demand:
“Stop the U.S. Massacres in Iraq! End the Occupation! Bring the Troops Home
Now!”—The Editors, Labor Standard.]

[The first article is from The
Independent (London) and was written by Patrick Coburn in Baghdad. The
second is from the Washington Post and was written by Karl Vick and
Anthony Shadid in Baghdad.]

Report 1:
“Do we look like fighters?”
ask Fallujah families with their disabled, their old, and their children

In an abandoned air-raid shelter in west
Baghdad, people from Fallujah crouch in semi-darkness. Their voices tremble as
they recall how they survived the week-long siege.

Not all did. In a tent outside relatives were
mourning for Mushref Mohi, aged 70, who died of exhaustion during the eight
hours that his family was kept waiting at U.S. checkpoints as they fled the
city.

“There was nothing much wrong with him and he
usually liked to walk everywhere instead of driving,” said his brother, Rabbia
Mohi Maloud al-Daraji. “But they kept us waiting from 10 am to 6.20 pm because
they searched every car for half an hour, and he could not take the strain.”

By yesterday morning 88 people from Fallujah had
crowded into Shelter No. 24, a disused bunker painted green and white in an
attempt at camouflage in the Amariyah district of Baghdad. Beds lined both
sides of the dark entrance corridor, dimly illuminated by a few bulbs that
flicker out during the frequent electricity cuts.

“Do we look like fighters?” asked Milouq Abbas,
a middle-aged woman in a black robe, pointing to her three children. Like other
survivors, she was outraged by the claim by the U.S. Marines that the 600 dead
and 1,200 wounded in Fallujah were mostly armed insurgents.

Although the families in Shelter No. 24 are very
poor, they had scraped together enough money to hire a mourning tent,
traditional in Iraq, for Mushref Mohi, so that his relatives could be comforted
over his death.

In one corner of the tent, wearing a white hat
and staring sightlessly in front of him, was Abdul Salaam, aged about 20 and
blind since birth. “I heard the roar of the bombing and I was frightened,” he
said. “I cannot read but I know a lot of the Koran by heart and I started
reciting it to myself.”

We were taken to the families in the shelter by
Dr Abed al-Illah, a specialist in internal medicine who is also a
representative of the Iraqi Islamic Party, which is part of the U.S.-appointed
Iraqi Governing Council. He had just visited Fallujah hospital. He said: “About
350 out of the 600 dead were women and children. One was only eight months old.
Many died from simple wounds and could have been saved if they had medical
attention.”

The anger and bitterness of Iraqis such as Dr
Illah, a veteran opponent of Saddam Hussein, over the slaughter of civilians in
Fallujah shows how few friends the U.S. has left in Iraq. He said: “The
Americans claim that all the wounded are fighters and will not let us take them
away. Families cannot escape because of their snipers.”

Outraged national feeling

On the gate into the Iraqi Islamic Party
headquarters in Amariyah is a poster of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, killed by an
Israeli missile last month. Inside other members of the party, almost all Sunni
Arabs, a party officially allied to the U.S. in Iraq, spoke in terms of
outraged nationalism.

“We are looking after 400 families from
Fallujah,” said Muneeb al-Durubi. Reflecting on the more general impact of the
crisis, he said: “The most important thing these days is a kind of marriage
between the Sunni and the Shia. The Americans gamble on dividing us, but the
Shia are providing food, medicine, and weapons. They have opened their homes to
refugees.” He thought only the Kurdish leaders were really loyal to the Allies.

An important development over the past week is
that, because of the attack on Fallujah and the offensive against the cleric
Muqtada Sadr, there are decreasing numbers of Iraqis on whom the U.S. can rely.
A central aim of the U.S. is to build up Iraqi security forces, but when the
620-man 2nd Battalion of the U.S.-trained new Iraqi army was ordered to
Fallujah last week they refused to go.

U.S. officers reportedly estimate that 20 to 25
per cent of the Iraqi security forces have disappeared, changed sides, or
declined to cooperate with the U.S. Iraqis working with foreigners of any kind
are increasingly fearful of being accused of being collaborators.

The U.S. Marine siege of Fallujah, designed to
isolate and pursue a handful of extremists in a restive town, has produced a
powerful backlash in the capital. Urged on by leaflets, sermons, and freshly
sprayed graffiti calling for jihad, young men are leaving Baghdad to join a
fight that residents say has less to do with battlefield success than with a
cause infused with righteousness and sacrifice.

“The fighting now is different from a year ago.
Before, the Iraqis fought for nothing. Now, fighters from all over Iraq are
going to sacrifice themselves,” said a Fallujah native who gave his name as Abu
Idris and claimed to be in contact with guerrillas who slip in and out of the
besieged city three and four times daily.

He spoke in a mosque parking lot emptied moments
earlier of more than a ton of donated foodstuffs destined for Fallujah—heavy
bags of rice, tea, and flour loaded into long, yellow semitrailers by a cluster
of men who, their work done, joined a spirited discussion about the need to
take the fight to the enemy. They included a dentist, a prayer leader, a law
student, a lieutenant colonel in the Iraqi police, and a man who until 10 days
earlier had traveled with U.S. troops as a member of the Iraqi Civil Defense
Corps.

“Our brothers who went to Fallujah and came back
say: ‘Oh, God, it is heaven. Anyone who wants paradise should go to Fallujah,’”
Abu Idris said.

The lopsided battle 35 miles to the west—where
2,500 Marines have been deployed—has had a profound impact here, redefining for
many in Baghdad the nature of the campaign against U.S. troops.

Deepened vein of nationalism

Intense, sympathetic, and often startlingly
graphic coverage on Arab channels has deepened a vein of nationalism, stirred
in part by still unconfirmed reports of high civilian casualties. Over the
weekend, in the living room of a decidedly secular family, a woman wept over
the images on a screen she finally leaned forward and kissed.

Headlines in Iraq's newly free press reinforce
the video images: “Fallujah Wakes to a Grave Massacre” read the banner in
Monday's edition of the daily Azzaman. Fresh graffiti sprayed in sweeping
Arabic letters is turning up across the city. On one wall in the southern
Baghdad neighborhood of Jihad, the messages were spaced 10 yards apart: “Long
live Fallujah’s heroes,” “Down with America and long live the Mahdi Army,” a
Shiite militia. Then: “Long live the resistance in Fallujah.” And finally,
“Long live the resistance.”

The popular response—of Shiite and Sunni giving
aid, shelter to refugees and even volunteers to the fight—has pushed fears of
an Iraqi civil war to the background. The fighters in Fallujah are said to
include Mahdi Army militiamen loyal to the radical cleric Moqtada Sadr. A housewife
in Baghdad's Salaam neighborhood told of a passionate argument with her
husband, a Shiite who insisted on joining friends volunteering to fight in
Fallujah.

“This is jihad,” she quoted him as saying. She
added: “It was the first time he ever slapped me.”

Some here are already speaking with the sense of
history—that powerful, deeply symbolic myths are being created.

Popular rebellion

“What is striking is how much has changed in a
week—a week,” said Wamid Nadhmi, a political science professor at Baghdad
University. “No one can talk about the Sunni Triangle anymore. No one can
seriously talk about Sunni-Shiite fragmentation or civil war. The occupation
cannot talk about small bands of resistance. Now it is a popular rebellion and
it has spread.”

“I think it will be bigger than Karameh,” he
added.

For a generation, the battle of Karameh created
the myths that propelled a movement. On March 21, 1968, an Israeli force of
15,000 struck at the Jordanian village of Karameh. The raid was retaliatory—guerrillas
had staged attacks from the village, just across the Jordan River. But in a
rare success, Palestinian guerrillas forced an embarrassing Israeli withdrawal
with the help of Jordanian artillery and armor.

For an Arab world accustomed to humiliating
defeats, a draw can assume mythic proportions. Repelling the Israeli army
amounted to the guerrillas’ biggest victory up to that time and energized
Palestinians.

Fallujah is producing a mythology of its own. In
the parking lot of the former Mother of All Battles Mosque, now renamed for the
sacred shrine in Mecca, Abu Idris told of a Saudi who came to Fallujah to
fight. Hearing that a Marine was sniping from a minaret, the Saudi asked for a
sniper rifle of his own, “and whenever a man came to stand on the minaret, he
killed him,” Abu Idris told the assembled crowd.

The account inverts the reports from the Marine
side of the front, where U.S. officers warned infantry of insurgents’ efforts
to draw fire to the mosque towers. But veracity may be a secondary concern in a
capital preoccupied by the belief that Fallujah is undergoing an unjust
collective punishment for the mutilation of four American security contractors
by a handful of men two weeks ago.

“It’s natural that many fighters from Baghdad
want to go to Fallujah and fight,” said Abdulqadir Mohammad Ali, prayer leader
at the modest Great Mosque in Baghdad’s Washash neighborhood. A Sunni mosque in
a mixed neighborhood, it displayed a Sadr poster on one wall.

Ali’s office smelled like a bakery, so fresh
were the cookies young men poured into the dozen bulging bags that crowded the
room, more food for Fallujah. The imam spoke over the din of the Koranic verses
that have been booming out of the mosque’s loudspeakers since the siege began
more than a week ago. On a bench beside a window, an elderly man read a
battered copy of the holy book and occasionally sobbed. Abdullah Hussein
Othman, a 70-year-old ethnic Kurd, explained he had two daughters in Fallujah.

“The exact image I want to give you is the young
men heading to fight in Fallujah are more [numerous] than the refugees coming
out of Fallujah,” Ali said. “We cannot control the feelings of the young.”

The fighters, he added, reject the label
“fedayeen,” the name for deposed president Saddam Hussein’s most zealous
fighters, who, like the new insurgents, favor black attire. “We say
‘mujaheddin,’ " he said, Arabic for sacred combatants.

Slang has also evolved. Many Shiites recall a
slogan they saw written on the barrel of an Iraqi tank dispatched to crush a
1991 Shiite uprising: “No more Shiites after today.” In the tumultuous
aftermath of Hussein’s fall a year ago, new slogans went up across cities in
Shiite-dominated southern Iraq: “No Baathists after today.”

Monday, in the Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiya,
there was another variation: “No occupation after today.”

The resistance also recently acquired a logo.
Two fingers form a victory sign over an image of Iraq on posters that appeared
in Baghdad on Monday. The words “No to the occupation” appear over the date
Baghdad fell: April 9, 2003. Sadr makes the same gesture in a poster of his
own.

“I don't think any honorable Iraqi could stand
by and do nothing when he sees women and children killed,” said Abu Ali, a
merchant in the once avowedly pro-Hussein neighborhood of Karrada. “An Iraqi
must either fight or leave the country. It is better for him to be hosted by
the graves than just watching and doing nothing.”

How many Iraqis are volunteering to fight in
Fallujah cannot be easily determined. The Baghdad man who quit the Civil
Defense Corps because of Fallujah said he could name 30 friends who have joined
the fight. But the man, who gave his name only as Ahmed, also spoke of Saudi
fighters recently arrived in the city “to sacrifice themselves,” and of word
passing through the resistance that Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian blamed by
U.S. officials for many suicide bombings, is sending a group into the country.

“There is no number to count the army that will
fight the Americans,” Ahmed said. “It’s so big, it’s limitless.”

Abu Idris said some Fallujah natives insisted
that they did not need help, leaving many volunteers to roam the region between
the city and the capital. The area has become a no-go zone in recent days, with
several journalists kidnapped and convoys attacked.

“Mujaheddin are just killing the agents who are
supplying the Americans,” said a teenager who gave his name as Abu Hanifa. He
smiled, then scampered into the back of a blue truck with the other volunteers.
Calling out for a photograph, they laughed and held up two fingers in a victory
sign.

As the truck pulled away, the teenager called
out: “We will defeat you, God willing.”